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Alfonzo Hernandez F.
Prof. Trevor Young-Hyman
Organizational Behavior
11/7/19
The Change of an Unmotivated Individual
Motivation consists of psychological forces that cause people to choose to invest effort
into certain tasks or actions. This basic concept is composed of direction, intensity, and
persistence. Direction defines what one should do, intensity defines how hard one should work,
and persistence defines for how long one must work for. In understanding of these components
people have a higher chance to act and expand effort into a task or action. A time where
motivation played a key role in my life was when I was involved with the Resident Student
Association (RSA). During my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh, I was involved in
RSA as a member of the residence hall council. Hall council is a subdivision of the RSA that
oversees and manages the entertainment and “lifestyle” of the residents for that specific
dormitory. There is an assigned hall council for each dormitory on campus at the University of
Pittsburgh. I was a part of the Litchfield Tower B hall council as the programming chair. While
being a part of RSA, I was at times motivated and at times unmotivated.
I was an unmotivated member of the hall council because I had no guidance or sense of
direction whatsoever during the first semester. Motivation started to gradually form throughout
the first and second semester once I applied myself and found a way to incorporate motivation
theories into my position. Not only did I find a way throughout the school year to become a
motivated member in the hall council, but all my team members as well.
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The Resident Student Association is setup to be mostly run by students. At least for the
residence hall council, motivation was hard for my team to come by since fundraising, planning
events and communicating amongst the RSA seemed almost impossible at the beginning. During
hall council meetings, the person who oversaw our progress as a team was the Resident Director
(RD) for the residence hall, and also Resident Assistants (RA) who helped the RD. Due to the
fact that the RSA is mostly run by students, my preconceptions and anticipated goals for the hall
council itself were completely erroneous. My team during my hall council involvement was full
of talented and determined students, but at the beginning of the semester some of my team
members including myself felt that figuring everything out on our own seemed almost
impossible. My team and I had to learn everything from scratch, such as how to plan events and
raise money without any guidance from the RSA. The residence hall council goes throughout the
